JESSE GROSJEAN  Thanks for everyone's comments on moving to Leopard only. I've just started a thread in my user forums looking for feedback on specific issues that you think should be addressed before doing Leopard only. Please add your comments to that thread.

http://hogbaysoftware.com/forums/taskpaper/topics/387_What_should_I_work_on_before_1_1_and_going_Leopard_only  
(Version 1.0.2)

JESSE GROSJEAN  This thread discusses this decision...

http://hogbaysoftware.com/forums/taskpaper/topics/338_Leopard_Only_for_1_1_Was_Recognizing_URLs_and_URIs_

In my mind, since your upgrade will be free once you decide to upgrade to Leopard, I don't see a lot of downside for existing users.

There are apps that are planning to go Leopard only. Here are a few big ones that I've heard about. Delicious Library. TextMate 2.0. Also consider lots of apples apps like Mail, iCal, etc.

There are really good reasons for going Leopard only. It will enable me to produce a higher quality application quicker. And you are free to upgrade when you are read.  
(Version 1.0.1)

JESSE GROSJEAN  Hi, this is Jesse from Hog Bay Software. I will be sending out licenses keys once the sale is over and I get the full list of orders. That should be on Friday I think.  
(Version 1.0.1)

JESSE GROSJEAN  Uhh as the original Mori developer I don't agree at all.

If you look at Mori's release history you'll see that there have been at least 5 releases in 2007. Including a fairly big release going from 1.5 to 1.6. They required work, and that was within the last year, so your just wrong on that point.

I assume that you liked Hog Bay Notebook better then Mori? Well your in a vocal minority. A lot of people, myself included, find Mori to be a much improved Hog Bay Notebook replacement. It's faster, has more features such as smart folders and custom columns, and the interface looks a lot cleaner in my opinion.

Recently I sold Mori to another developer... Why do you consider that a bad thing? My time is limited and I didn't feel like I had the time I needed to put into Mori's development. I could have just let it die, but I didn't feel that would be fair to people who bought it. So instead I went through a long process looking for someone who was excited to continue Mori's development. Geeez... sorry about that, I thought it was a good thing. And I think "most" Mori users agree with me.  
(Version 1.6.1)

JESSE GROSJEAN  WriteRoom has thousands of happy users. Numerous people have written in saying that it changes the way that they write. I've even had people say that they switched from PC to Mac just so they could use WriteRoom.

So why are you wasting, your time, my time, and everyone else's time by trashing my app for no good reason? I'm an independent mac developer and I rely on word of mouth. If someone like you goes around trashing my apps then a small Mac developer like me can disappear.

"You can accomplish the same result by expanding a window in TextEdit to take over the entire screen"

That's not true for a lot of reasons. For one just try it. If you make Text Edit full screen then notice how there are no margins? For most people text that spans across the entire screen isn't much fun to read or write, and that's why WriteRoom will block out your entire screen, but presents your text in a nice easily readable column in the center of your screen.

It's fine to say that you don't find WriteRoom useful yourself. And yes the preferences could be simpler, but Writers want to control over every aspect of their writing environment. And so I've decided to error on the side of to many preferences so people work like they want instead of too few so they can't.

I'd appreciate if you would delete your comment or at least edit it so that there is some logic to it. At this point You've given WriteRoom 1 star. The worst possible rating and that's not fair.

Thanks,

Jesse  
(Version 2.1)

JESSE GROSJEAN  OK, sorry hard to tell in forums like these. Anyway WriteRoom was certainly out before Writer and all of the other (well released recently anyway, I guess DOS has lots of editors like this) only full screen text editors that I'm aware of.

But (as you are probably already aware) the full screen editor concept is certainly not a WriteRoom invention. Lots of other apps have had the feature for a while, the trouble was that the feature was just one of many so it was a little harder to make use of. Also at the same time that I was building WriteRoom Khoi Vinh was publicizing his www.blockwriter.com idea.

So we traded a number of ideas around BlockWriter, in the end WriteRoom (intentionally) doesn't follow all of the Blockwriter concepts, WriteRoom's more of a traditional text editor, just in full screen. Writer on the other hand seems to be much more faithful to the Blockwriter idea.  
(Version 2.0.1)

JESSE GROSJEAN  Actually WriteRoom came first, thanks for asking.

Your "I'm intrigued by the similarities :D" comment seems to be implying that I ripped them off somehow. Sorry to ruin your fun, but nope I'm not.

And I would encourage you to take a look at both Writer and WriteRoom, they tackle a similar problem, but in fairly different ways. I much prefer the WriteRoom way, but you may very well prefer the Writer way.  
(Version 2.0.1)

JESSE GROSJEAN  Please post these sorts of bugs on the Hog Bay Software site where it's easier for me to keep track of them. I think at least some of these problems are specific to your (or at least a small number of peoples) computers, because I'm sure I would have heard about them before if they happened everywhere.

In particular the typing problems in full screen mode sound very strange and I'm sure that they are not happening for most people. My guess is there must be some conflic with a third party application that you have installed? Do you have any haxies or typing enhacing programs installed?  
(Version 2.0.1)

JESSE GROSJEAN  I am pretty flexible on pricing if cash really is an issue.

http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/node/478  
(Version 2.0.1)

JESSE GROSJEAN  Thanks for your comments. The trouble is it's always hard to figure out what features to list on these download sites. The issue being that I already listed that feature and others when I posted the previous betas, the changes listed here are the ones that have been made between the last beta and the 2.0 release.

Anyway thanks. Also I just want to mention that the EIWR implementation was made possible by some code that the TextMate people made availble, so thanks to them also.   
(Version 2.0)

JESSE GROSJEAN  I don't understand what you mean or why it warrents a 1 star rating. By default WriteRoom will launch into full screen mode, because that's what most people want, but you can easily change this behavior in the full screen preferences. I'm not sure what you mean about Safari, WriteRoom shouldn't be launching Safari normally.  
(Version 2.0)

JESSE GROSJEAN  I don't think we are nuts... check through our user forums on the hogbaysoftware.com website and you'll find many very happy users. Many are professional writers who are very aware of Ulyses and similar tools, for them WriteRoom is still an important part of their writing process. If you don't like it there's no need to buy, but it would be nice if you could just ignore WriteRoom instead of yell about how "nuts" we are. Thanks.  
(Version 2.0)

JESSE GROSJEAN  License keys will be sent out Saturday morning after the sale is over. Thanks for your interest.

- Jesse Grosjean, Hog Bay Software  
(Version 1.4)

JESSE GROSJEAN  I appriciate your comments, but I don't agree that WriteRoom 2.0 is a completely different beast then version 1.0.

WriteRoom 2.0 still has the single focus of being a distraction free writing environment. Some of the new features (such as the edit in writeroom plugin) make it even better in this respect. Now you can easily get any text into and out of writeroom with a single keystroke. Where before getting text into and out of writeroom was a mutlistage distracting process.

Of course there are differences and you have picked up on the biggest, the change to a document based model. In many cases this makes things easier. For instance say you want to edit a text file on your computer and edit it in WriteRoom. Now it's simple, just open the document and edit it. Previously you would have needed to import, edit, and then export, a much longer process.

You are correct that this change does take away the automanagment of your documents (you now need to save them somewhere) and I can understand how this make things worse for some uses. And thats something that can be added back later on if there is enough demand.

But I don't really thing its fair to say that WriteRoom 2.0 is a completely different application that abandons the cause of a distraction free writing environment. That's still 100% the goal.  
(Version 2.0b)

JESSE GROSJEAN  Why's it so bad that it's become shareware? And yes 1.0 will still be availible for free. Basically shareware means that I (the developer) care more about the app and will be much more likely to continue working it in the future. To me the price seems very fair after all the time that I've put into it, especially if you really do find it useful. If you think I can somehow handle the transition to shareware better let me know, but I do need to make money somehow. I'm trying to make a living at this.  
(Version 2.0b)

JESSE GROSJEAN  Ahh yes, optical illusion makes sense. Of course never say never, but I think it's pretty unlikely that it would actually change the color of text in other apps.   
(Version 1.0)

JESSE GROSJEAN  But I think it turned all my white text a very light shade of pink.

Which text did it turn pink? You can change the text color that WriteRoom uses in WriteRoom's preferences, that might help.  
(Version 1.0b3)

JESSE GROSJEAN  Opps, yes forgot to update the (1.2) version number. But the build number was updated, if you have build (60) then you have the latest 1.2.1 version.  
(Version 1.2.1)

JESSE GROSJEAN  I agree somewhat. WriteRoom isn't really intended to be a word processor, and if you are a writing a novel or something a tool like CopyWrite, Ulysses, (or even Mori :) ) is a better tool for managing the whole project. WriteRoom tries to fill a niche for cases when you don't really want to set up a while writing project, but still want to work in full screen mode. Things like emails, blog entries... this post in fact.  
(Version 1.0b2)

JESSE GROSJEAN  Please post in our user forums about this problem with a bit more detail and system info. I haven't heard of any of these problems before.  
(Version 1.0b2)

JESSE GROSJEAN  If you haven't yet please report your problems in your user forms. Also you might be able to fix the problem by choosing the menu item Help > Check and Repair Notebook. It seems that when importing some notebooks Mori gets confused, but running Check and Repair will fix it in most cases.  
(Version 1.2b)